EDIT: A previous version of this post listed the release as 2011-11-10, it’s actually 2011-11-08, my error! We did not delay two days or anything.

So we just got done signing off on the Fedora 16 release. It’ll be going out according to the (post-Beta) schedule, on 2011-11-08. Mark your calendars! It’ll be a fun release. Huge thanks to the anaconda team, ajax, releng, and all the awesome people on the QA team – Andre, Jayson, Sandro, Athmane, John, Konrad from Oracle, and RH’s Kamil (and his merry band of interns), Tao, Hongqing, Tim, and everyone else – for the incredible effort you all put in to get this thing done, it’s utterly absurd that we made the date for this thing with all the fixing and testing that was necessary.

But never mind that! That’s not the coolest news of the day, not by a long shot. The coolest news of the day is:

As well as contributing one of the vital F16 fixes at one of the earlier ‘last minutes’ in the process, ajax has only been and gone and got GNOME Shell running in a KVM. Oh, hell yes.

That’s Shell running on software OpenGL, llvmpipe specifically. Still very early, but should be committed to Rawhide soon and therefore available in Fedora 17. Amazing work. As well as making it work in VMs, this should allow Shell to work on just about any system with a reasonable amount of CPU power, even if it doesn’t have hardware accelerated 3D. Almost no need for fallback mode any more!